Mafia-CIA assassination plots -- MAFCIA

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION…

(Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2013) by LAMAR WALDRON

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            The main objection to the theory that the Mafia planned the assassination of President Kennedy has always been that it would not have had the power to cover-up its role in the murder.  Nor would it have had the ability to control, curtail, and compromise the autopsy, to bamboozle all the media, to intimidate witnesses speaking to FBI agents, and to appoint a blue-ribbon commission that would issue a report with 26 volumes of documentary support, purporting to prove that the assassin was a lone-nut, never once mentioning the Mafia!

Because the Mafia clearly lacked such power, either the Warren Commission was correct in attributing the assassination to Oswald, or the cover-up and murder, were conducted by higher-ups in the US Government – like Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, the FBI, etc.    Or, it was the work of Fidel Castro and/or the Soviets.  Were that the case, the demand by the American public for retaliation would press our leaders to launch a large-scale invasion of Cuba, which could unleash World War III.  To prevent nuclear war, American leaders chose to cover up the evidence of Communist conspiracy that culminated in Dallas.  The American leaders chose cover-ups and deception in preference to the truth and nuclear war.

Waldron’s purpose is to remove the chief obstacles to the view that the Mafia conspiracy resulted in the assassination of Jack Kennedy.  Waldron notes that in the last days of the Eisenhower Administration, CIA and Mafia links were forged in plots to overthrow and assassinate the radical Fidel Castro in Cuba.  With the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in spring 1961, however, the newly inaugurated President Kennedy believed he had been misled by the CIA and proceeded to fire its leader, Allen Dulles.  Many Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for the failure of that mission because Kennedy had refused to support the landing with major air, and if necessary, American land support.

The Missile Crisis of the fall of 1962 nudged the world to the edge of nuclear war.  Though some assumed there had been a “no invasion” pledge as part of the settlement, Waldron asserts that because Castro rejected inspection on Cuban soil, the no-invasion pledge  was inoperative.  Moreover, Kennedy ordered a halt to any American CIA collaboration with the Mafia, in part because his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was leading the prosecution of organized crime, and had even used some extra-legal tactics to deport New Orleans Mafia leader, Carlos Marcello.  Nevertheless, Pres. Kennedy still authorized clandestine plots to kill Castro, while simultaneously allowing top secret negotiations with the Castro regime to come to some accommodation.  But if no progress in those negotiations were evident by the end of November 1963, Pres. Kennedy decided to aid a coup in Cuba staged by Gen. Juan Almeida, the head of the Cuban army and the number three official under Castro.  In this coup, Fidel would be assassinated, and Almeida’s new government would request military intervention from the US to complete the counter-revolution.  The working date for that operation was 1 December 1963.

Unbeknownst to Kennedy and his new CIA leader, John McCone, however, the CIA’s Director of Planning Operations, Richard Helms, now held the highest operational post in the agency.  Helms knew of the previous CIA-Mafia collaboration toward eliminating Castro, and he ignored Kennedy’s demand to cut ties with the Mafia.  Instead, those earlier ties were retained and solidified between some CIA operatives and Mafia organizations in Florida (led by Santo Trafficante), Chicago (represented by Johnny Rosselli), and New Orleans (led by Marcello once he made it back to the US, probably flown in by pilot David Ferrie).

By linking the government approved assassination plots to kill Castro, with its own plots to kill Kennedy, the Mafia would make it impossible to unravel the truth without exposing the US government’s own deadly secrets to the American people, AND exposing General Almeida in Cuba to the wrath of Fidel.  Moreover, if the Mafia plot were successful, it could then plant false information implicating Castro as the culprit.  This might lead to calls for invasion of Cuba, Soviet retaliation, and WWIII.  The US government would then find it necessary to avoid war by covering up what really occurred in Dallas.  Thus, the cover-up was not conducted by the Mafia, but by innocent American leaders bent upon avoiding atomic war: President Lyndon Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, et al.

Waldron uses information garnered from tapes recorded for the FBI when Mafia chief Marcello was imprisoned; he confessed his role in the Kennedy assassination to a fellow inmate who was wearing a wire.  The information was not released when originally recorded, nor in 1986 when the FBI operation concluded, nor in 1992 when the Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Act.  In 1998, the FBI released the information, but it was buried in a flood of less important documents released at the same time.  Waldron’s own research found the confessions in 2006 and in this book he makes an impressive case.  Waldron asserts that the Mafia planned the assassination with plots in at least three cities that Kennedy would visit in the fall of 1963, and in each, a Lee Oswald-type patsy had been selected to deflect suspicion from the real killers.  Chicago, Tampa-Miami, and Dallas were the three sites that Kennedy would visit where Mafia hit men were imported to crush Camelot.  Waldron also refers to confessions by other Mafia leaders, including Trafficante, and Rosselli.  Waldron is good at reminding readers of how, when Congress reinvestigated the Kennedy murder, several Mafioso leaders were killed in most brutal fashions the day before they were to testify.  In addition, the wealthy white Russian who befriended the poor, “Marxist” Oswald in Dallas, George de Mohrenschildt, commited suicide the day before his scheduled testimony.  Waldron reminds readers of the number of “coincidental” deaths when Congress reinvestigated the events in Dallas.

Waldron provided an excellent time-line studded with provocative tidbits of information.  Thus, we learn that during the height of the Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962, Oswald, the “defector” to the USSR married to a Russian, gets a job in Dallas with a corporation performing sensitive photographic work for the US government, such as interpreting pictures of Cuban missile movements. (154)  Furthermore, despite his “defection”  and his later distribution of Fair Play for Cuba leaflets, Oswald was never placed on the FBI’s Security Index.(250, 258)  Another item to ponder: Waldron reveals that both Jack Ruby and Gen. Edwin Walker (the right-wing general whom Oswald allegedly shot at) were closeted homosexuals.(174)  Of course, one could argue that in the 1960s almost all gays were closeted.  In that era, if a man were openly homosexual, “out,” he was either “in” prison or “in” a mental institution.  Waldron also mentions the story of J. Edgar’s alleged arrest for homosexuality.(231)  Yet, Clay Shaw is barely mentioned in the book.

Before engaging in a general critique of the book, I shall point out some minor errors.  Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs, father of ABC and NPR commentator Cokie Roberts, was a US Representative, not a Senator.(31)  Boggs WAS a member of the Warren Commission, but Louisiana Sen. Russell Long was NOT.(146)  Also, Waldron asserts that “there were only two time periods when Oswald could have worked for Marcello as a runner: one in late April or early May 1963…and the other in late July, August, and …September 1963,…”(181-82)  But Oswald might have worked for Marcello much earlier, when he was a teenager living in New Orleans.

I disagree with Waldron’s assessment that the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison hindered the investigation by mainstream media of the Kennedy assassination.(15)  Though the jury quickly found Clay Shaw not guilty of conspiring to kill JFK, they told local reporters that they were convinced that JFK was a victim of a conspiracy.  Garrison’s prosecution showed the Zapruder film in the courtroom, eventually unwrapping it for all to see how Kennedy’s head moved to the back and left when struck by the fatal shot.  Under oath Dr. Pierre Finck described how doctors in Bethesda followed military orders at the expense of providing Kennedy a thorough autopsy.  If the national media were hostile to Garrison, not all of the local outlets were so biased.  Thus, when local news reporters pressed Atty. Dean Andrews (a Marcello atty., according to Waldron) after he was indicted by Garrison for perjury, Andrews initially sought to evade the reporter’s questions.  Finally he blurted out, “If they can kill the President, they can squash me like a roach.”  These are but a few of the revelations that were a consequence of Garrison’s courage in challenging the Federal Government’s narrative about the assassination.

At the outset of Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, the Federal Government openly intervened to obstruct.  US Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced that the Feds had already investigated Shaw and concluded he had nothing to do with the assassination!  When was this investigation?  Who investigated?  Why did they investigate Shaw?  The Feds did everything possible to obstruct the Garrison prosecution, so that crucial witnesses could flee Louisiana, and governors like Ronald Reagan of California and James Rhodes of Ohio, after consulting with federal officials, simply refused to extradite important witnesses like Gordon Novel.  How could any DA win a case under such circumstances?

Even Waldron concedes, “Recently released FBI files show that in the late spring of 1967, Garrison twice privately considered indicting Marcello for the assassination of JFK but decided not to.”(458)  Waldron’s thesis is that Marcello was guilty of the murder, and yet he claims that the only official who contemplated charging Marcello with that crime, simply hindered mainstream media investigations!  Were those recently released FBI files that Waldron refers to intended to facilitate DA Garrison probe?  Or to sabotage it?  And had Garrison charged Marcello with killing Kennedy, would the mass media have been any more sympathetic to Garrison?

Waldron includes a most salient paragraph: “…declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms immediately began a significant public relation counteroffensive, issuing detailed instruction on how to smear critics of the Warren Report.  For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives 53-pages of specific instructions on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the ‘lone-nut’ conclusion…In many ways, those PR counteroffensives by the FBI and CIA would last for decades, and some writers make the case that they continue even today.”(14-15)

Garrison failed to convict Clay Shaw.  I would contend because of the hostility of the Feds, there is no way Garrison could have convicted Marcello either.  The national, main-stream media followed the marching orders of the federal government – orders issued softly through their agency operatives and friends.

Important in the “get Garrison” media campaign was journalist Walter Sheridan.  Waldron maintains Sheridan was sent to New Orleans by Robert Kennedy.  Why would Robert Kennedy seek to destroy a DA who at least considered charging Carlos Marcello, arch-nemesis of the Kennedys?  And was Robert really the dominant figure in the autopsy of his brother at Bethesda, as maintained by Waldron?(399-401)

Because the thrust of Waldron’s book is assassination by the Mafia, he mentions the murder of Guatemalan leader Castillo Armas in July 1957 by a “lone Communist” assassin, who then killed himself with the same weapon used to kill Armas.  But there were rumors at the time that Armas had run afoul of the Mafia, and Rosselli was then in Guatemala.(94)  Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, the strong man of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in what Waldron calls a gangland-type murder.(145)  And since Waldron explicated MafCia assassinations, he might have expanded his all-to-brief accounts of two other assassination, even if the Mafia had nothing to do with them:  – 1) the assassination of the Prime Minister in the newly independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961 (p. 136, though his name is misspelt in Waldron’s index); and  - 2) the assassination of South Viet Nam’s Ngo Dinh Diem on 2 November 1963.(303)  With Waldron’s slight treatment of the latter, he evades speculation on the CIA’s role in that murder and its effect on future American policy in Vietnam and any connection between Diem’s demise may have had on events in Dallas.  Because Waldron’s thesis is that the Mafia had to blur the lines between two plots, an anti-Castro one in league with the CIA, and the one targeting JFK, he might have elaborated more on the CIA practices.

There are anomalies in Waldron’s work.  On the one hand, we read that: “The [New Orleans police lieutenant who talked to Oswald after his arrest with the FPCC in NO] also said that Oswald ‘liked the President,’ a sentiment shared by most people who ever heard Oswald mention JFK;”(251) and :”…It’s important to keep in mind that others such as  Anthony Summers have documented that ‘nobody has ever made the flimsiest allegation that the authentic Lee Oswald had anything but good to say about John Kennedy’  This is true of Oswald’s interrogations, his media appearances, and his private talks.”(338)

On the other hand, Waldron also reports that:  “The head of the Ku Klux Klan told veteran newspaper report and editor Patsy Sims that he had met with Oswald in Atlanta.  In her definitive history of the Klan, Sims writes that ‘one of her sources told her that Oswald, in the summer of 1963, had called on [Klan] Imperial Wizard James Venable in his office in Atlanta seeking the names of right-wing associates.  Venable confirmed [to Sims] that he was fairly sure that Oswald had been there for that purpose.’  Oswald indicated to Venable that he was on his way to Chicago.  Klan leader Venable made his statement to Sims in the 1980s and it is difficult to see why Venable would make up an Oswald encounter since it tended to link Oswald with ‘right-wing associates,’ thus potentially giving the FBI reason to interview or investigate them.”

“In the 1960s, Klan leader Venable was close to an associate of Guy Banister, white supremacist Joseph Milteer, who lived in Georgia…”(286)

If this meeting did occur, it may have had more to do with the Banister-, Milteer-, far-right plot than about Oswald’s personal opinion of Kennedy.  Oswald may have simply been following Banister’s instructions, as he had done when pretending to be a Castro-sympathizer handing out FPCC leaflets.

A related question: what was the connection between the Mafia and the racist, far-right?  Clearly, some Cubans who had fled Castro’s far-left oppression in Cuba, may have felt more comfortable with right end of the political spectrum.  The KKK certainly inhabits that end.  Milteer, who was taped predicting the assassination prior to events in Dallas, and then gloating about them, was clearly far-right.  So did Milteer, who prediction of, and later gloating over, the assassination was tape-recorded.  Moreover, Milteer declared that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy originated in New Orleans, backed by considerable sums, not all donated by right-wingers.  Milteer mentioned only one Louisiana politician (311), but Waldron does not reveal that name.  I will go on a limb to say that I suspect the politician was the leader of Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish (county), Judge Leander Perez.

In 1952 when Judge Perez decided to endorse the Republican ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon for President, Plaquemines Parish voted over 93% for the Republicans – the highest percentage of any county in the entire nation.(Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta, p. 194)  In November 1960 when courts ordered desegregation of two New Orleans schools, Perez urged defiance, and allowed whites to escape their integrated school by attending schools in neighboring St. Bernard Parish (also Perez=dominated).  In 1961 CORE began its Freedom Rides, where CORE members on buses attempted to integrate bus stations from Washington, DC, to New Orleans.  Most were stopped by brutal mobs or arresting police, and one bus was burnt.  This made national and international headlines.  It was rumored (not Jeansonne’s biography, but my memory is the source for the rest of this paragraph – HM) that Perez then induced George Lincoln Rockwell to travel from his base in Virginia through the same route as the Greyhound buses to New Orleans on his “hate bus.”  Rockwell was leader of the American Nazi Party.  Before entering New Orleans, local police demanded that he cover some of the signs that decorated his van – “Kill Commies, Queers, and Jews!”  When in May 1961 Rockwell and some of his uniformed crew were arrested for picketing the film “Exodus,” there were rumors that Guy Banister, a one-time Acting Superintendent of the NO Police, paid his bail.  When Judge Perez went to the Hotel Roosevelt’s Blue Room (possibly the premier NO night spot at that time), Ted Lewis was performing.  One of his signature acts was to sing “Me and My Shadow,” while a Black dancer in black clothing danced as his shadow.  The judge was not happy with this integrated entertainment.  Perhaps he was aware that Ted Lewis had been born, Theodore Friedman.  To express his displeasure, the judge purposely broke glasses where the shadow was to step, causing the Black to cut his foot.  In the spring of 1969 Judge Perez passed on.  In Plaquemines Parish, two young Black men entered a store and announced they wanted to purchase liquor to celebrate the death of the Judge.  They were quickly arrested and sentenced to 6 month’s hard labor.  After serving only a few months, the NAACP succeeded in curtailing the sentence.

Why would Marcello have a low-level racial extremist like Milteer aware of the plot to kill Kennedy if this were merely a Mafia operation?  Does this make sense?

Let me describe several incidents related to the question I just posed.  It is truly amazing how different our relatives can be from each other and from ourselves.  By the late 1950s I had become an integrationist in my native New Orleans.  This amounted to little more than speaking in favor of the idea in high school and then college.  That changed in September 1960 when I was among the seven arrested in the first lunch-counter sit-in in New Orleans.  It occurred at the large Woolworth’s on Canal and Rampart Streets.  When my father heard of the sit-in in progress, he left work to try to get me away.  Police had cordoned off the counter area, and would not allow anyone to pass.  With our arrests, and our names on p. 1 of the local paper and on national TV (we did not see it as we were still in jail), it was now clear to all that I was a nlover.  Although I moved from my parents’ home so as not to endanger them, it did not matter.  They received phone calls in the middle of the night, threatening to bomb the home.  Thank God we had no restrictive gun control laws back then.  My father easily borrowed a gun and bullets from a co-worker.  After a few months, the spotlight of hatred moved to the other end of the city, for in November Perez and others were instigating resistance to the court-ordered desegregation of two public schools.  I was suddenly old news.  My dad felt safe enough to return the gun.  Upon getting it back, his co-worker asked my father, “Why did you borrow so many bullets?  Only one would have done the job.”  I was not very popular.

But one relative sought to help, - my crazy uncle.  Of course, he probably thought of me as his crazy nephew.  After my arrest with CORE for integration, my uncle sought to restore honor to the family, by sending money to George Lincoln Rockwell’s organization.  As a young child I once overheard him moaning over some beers, “Oh, if only Hitler had won.”  My uncle had been in the merchant marine and had risked his life during WWII to get supplies to the nations fighting against the Axis.  But he did not agree with FDR’s foreign policy.  Meanwhile, I had been convicted of a felony (the sit-in), and was trying to survive.  I certainly was not seeking another arrest, but I did continue to participate in various demos throughout the 1960s, any one of which might result in an arrest.  Finally, in 1969 my car was followed by a police helicopter, and when I let a passenger out of the auto, he was immediately arrested.  I decided then it was time to leave my native city.

I would occasionally see that uncle when he visited my parents.  He had a special greeting for me, “How are the burr heads doing?”  This would rile me a little, but I knew him well enough just to roll my eyes.  Sometimes he would speak with my dad, but sometimes he would address me, “Oh, that Bobby!  They’re gonna get that Bobby!”  He was referring to Atty. Gen Robert Kennedy who seemed to be pushing integration.  I just tried to ignore him.

After a few years, I moved back with my parents and got a job teaching 5^th grade in a new, private school.  Around lunch one day, Mrs. Flagg, another 5^th grade teacher called me to her class room across the hall.  Hers was enjoying a free period for lunch, and one of her pupils had brought in a new item, a transistor radio.  She told me to listen.  Most of her class was playing, making lots of noise, while she and I craned our necks above the 10-year-old and his radio.  I heard the main points, but could not leave my class unattended for long.

When I returned to my class, I informed them that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  The class cheered.  I was stunned.  One girl placed her head on the table and cried.  She was the exception.  That was November 1963.  Sometime after that, probably early 1964, I again encountered my uncle.  “What did I tell you, huh?  What did I tell you?”  Honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about.  Then he became more explicit, “Didn’t I tell you they were going to get him?”  Suddenly, shocked, I realized what he was referring to.  Now, I tried a counter.  “But you said they were going to get Bobby!”  “Well, they got the other one instead.”  This time, exasperated, I finally asked, “Who is this ‘they’ you keep talking about?”  He quickly responded, “The mob out in the parish.”  By the mob, he meant Marcello; by “out in the parish,” he meant Jefferson Parish.  When he said this, my parents resided one block from the Airline Highway and the Church with the Neon Bible.  We were only a few blocks from Jefferson Parish and Marcello’s office in the Town and Country Motel.  My uncle’s response simply confirmed my view that my uncle was crazy.  Who in early 1964 was linking Carlos Marcello to the Kennedy assassination?  This sounded ever more absurd.  When he said this, I had already earned a BA and an MA from Tulane University.  My uncle had finished 5^rd grade.  I was a scholar.  He drove a taxi.  It was easy to dismiss his ravings.  But years later I could only wonder, were they really ravings?  Or was I too arrogant to accept information when it was handed to me?

Despite the occasional repetition and lack of footnotes, and a few minor errors, Waldron has written a book that will be difficult to ignore.  

MUGGED AND BUGGED

MUGGED: RACIAL DEMAGOGUERY FROM

THE SEVENTIES TO OBAMA (New York: Sentinel, 2012)

BY ANN COULTER

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            Flaherty’s White Girl Bleed a Lot is like reading raw material, recent newspaper reports of Black racist mobs and attacks on whites printed or shown in local media, and too often, with the racial nature of the crimes purposely obscured.  Coulter’s excellent book is similar, but significantly different.  Coulter has taken the raw material from the 1960s on, boiled down the essential stories of racial crimes and criminal hoaxes, used her flavorful language to emphasize the meat of the stories, and then she tops them with sprinkles of her sharp wit.

            In this book Coulter has performed a public service.  She assembles names and events that are fading from memory, spotlighting the injustices, the insanity, the viciousness, indeed, the monstrous anti-white racism and its supporters.  Coulter avoids that phrase, but it underlies her exposes of so many crimes against whites of the past few decades, crimes in which the media, academia, judges, juries, mayors, chiefs of police, have been all too complicit.  Yet, I am bugged, annoyed, by her distorted analysis of the role of the Republican Party on many of these issues.

            The strength of Mugged  is Coulter’s summary recounts of the cases of Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Larry Davis, Lemrick Nelson, Edmund Perry, Channon Christian and Christopher Newson, Tawana Brawley, the 1972 “incident” at Minister Farrakhan’s mosque in New York City, the left-wing minister Jim Jones, Rodney King, OJ, the Duke Lacrosse team “rapes,” Bernard Goetz, and more.

            From her book I learned that the only person convicted of a felony at the OJ trial was police detective Mark Fuhrman.  As Coulter summarized it: “In 1995, Americans discovered it was considered a graver offense to use ‘the N-word’ than to cut off a woman’s head.”(127)  Fuhrman was convicted of perjury, while OJ walked free – to the cheers of racist Blacks throughout the nation.  Coulter believes that the OJ verdict wakened whites to their appeasement of Black crime, and that whites changed their attitudes, shedding their white guilt feelings thereafter.(p. 15)  Unfortunately, I see little sign of the wakening Coulter writes of.  White guilt liberalism excuses the anti-white racist policies of a failed Black President, and white guilt helped elect and re-elect him.

            I also learned about the support of Black racist terror by a leading Democratic politician.  Once the Rodney King riots erupted, a white truck driver, Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck.  “As Henry Keith Watson stood on Denny’s neck, other black thugs repeatedly kicked and stomped him, smashed his head with a claw hammer, and threw a five-point oxygenator – stolen from another bloodied white truck driver – at his head.  In a final gruesome act. Damian ‘Football’ Williams picked up a slab of concrete and heaved it directly on Denny’s head…fracturing his skull in ninety-one places.  Williams then did a victory dance around Denny’s body,…(121)  Coulter reminds us of how Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters quickly defended the actions of Williams and the other Black racist monsters, demanding that all charges against them be dropped, trying to sway public opinion in their favor.  None of those shown in this atrocity on tape were convicted of a felony, except Williams, who was convicted of causing mayhem.  Once he completed his short sentence, Rep. Waters found a job for the concrete-throwing Williams.

            Coulter might have added a few items to her assortment of horrors – like the statistics showing crime dropped dramatically on New York City subways during the quarter after Bernard Goetz shot his poised attackers.  But overall, her thumbnail sketches of the atrocities of the past decades are vivid, concise, and stinging in their cumulated impact.

            Yet I have a major disagreement with Coulter in her analysis.  In her view Republicans are the great defenders of civil rights, and Democrats the champions of segregation and discrimination.  “The entire his of civil rights consists of Republicans battling Democrats to guarantee the constitutional rights of black people.”(1)  “Not all Democrats were   segregationists, but all segregationists were Democrats.”(1)  While there is much truth in her statements, the reality was more nuanced.

            Coulter demonstrates how liberal Democratic icons like Sen. William Fulbright (Ark.), Sen. Sam Ervin (NC), and Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952 Sen. John Sparkman (Ala.), were all staunch segregationists.  Democratic Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had even attended a left-wing school and would become the governor who tried to prevent integration of Central High in Little Rock.  It would take Republican President Eisenhower to send troops to integrate that school, the first time since Reconstruction that troops were sent South to defend the rights of Blacks.  On a personal note, I was born and raised in what was then the largest city of the South, New Orleans; I participated and was arrested in the city’s first lunch-counter sit-in in September 1960.  Responding to our arrest, the liberal Democratic Mayor, DeLesseps Morrison officially announced that the city would not tolerate any further incidents.  We soon became convicted felons.  In November, when the first two schools were integrated, the liberal mayor did nothing to prevent harassment of those few who sent their children past the angry mothers to the newly mixed schools.

            Though I took a stand against segregation, one must not take the present politically correct position that all segregation was evil.  One of the Longs was asked to improve the lot of Blacks in Louisiana.  He agreed to do so, but warned that they might not like his method of doing so.  At a hospital, the governor spotted a white nurse with a Black male patient.  Horrors!  Governor Long assured the press he would stop such practices by hiring Black nurses.  While segregation was separate but rarely equal, it was better than no services for Blacks, the condition that often preceded the era of segregation.  Moreover, there were good segregated Black schools, even during the era of Jim Crow.  I don’t recall reading of metal detectors at the segregated Black schools of yore.

            Some Republican sought outreach to the pro-segregationist whites in the South.  Indeed, these Republicans often fought the “old guard” who might have the support the Black and Tan (the Blacks) delegations to the national GOP conventions.  Theodore Roosevelt may have invited Booker Washington to dine in the White House, but we know TR was a highly educated man.  And he shared the scientific views of the era, which were quite racist.  When he challenged William Taft for the GOP nomination in 1912, he sought to replace some of the Black and Tans with whites.  When TR lost the nomination to Taft and established his Bull Moose Progressive Party, there was no outreach to Blacks, no planks in the new party’s platform about civil rights.  When Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the 3-way election, he demonstrated his progressive and scientific approach by segregating the federal civil service.  When Quaker Hoover ran against Catholic Smith in 1928, his inroads in the South were made by many who upheld segregation (and who probably hated Catholics more than Republicans).

            In the 1930s another party rose to champion the rights of Blacks – the Communist Party.  In 1931 in Alabama two white women accused several Blacks of raping them.  In the small town of Scottsboro they were quickly found guilty and 8 of 9 were sentenced to death.  Communist won control of the case and led a two-pronged defense: 1) obtain superb lawyers for the court-room proceedings, and 2) agitate about the case outside in Scottsboro and throughout the world.  The party and its front groups gathered signatures for the Scottsboro Boys from Mms. Sun Yat Sen (China), Albert Einstein (then German), Maxim Gorki (Soviet), Nobel laureate Romain Rolland (France), Johnstone Kenyatta (later to be better known as Jomo, leader of the Mau Mau in Africa), and in the US, Chief Red Cloud, Langston Hughes, et al.  The mother of two of the accused toured Europe giving speeches on behalf of her sons.  Not since the American Civil War had the issue of the treatment of Blacks in America received such international attention.  Suddenly intellectuals were concerned about 9 young Blacks accused of rape.  The case went to the US Supreme Court twice.

            Coulter may have exposed a lie by journalist Carl Bernstein about his teenage role as a civil rights activist.  On that, she may be correct.  But Bernstein in his autobiography mentions another incident that rings true.  He wrote that as a young boy he was with his mother as they engaged in a restaurant sit-in in Baltimore sponsored the Left-wing (pro-CP) Henry Wallace Progressive Party.  Even weakened in the Cold War era, the Communists were still demonstrating for the rights of Black people.

            To prevent a Black March on Washington during WWII, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt appointed an FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission) with limited power to investigate racial discrimination in defense industries.  States began to consider having their own FEPC laws and committees.  The first to consider such a law was New York, a state then controlled by Republicans.  While most legislative Democrats supported the measure, many Republicans opposed, fearing it would result in the Hitlerian reign of racial and religious quotas.  It was only with the strong support of the propose law by Republican Governor Thomas Dewey that New York won its FEPC.  In other northern and western states the Democrats were more favorable to the legislation, especially with fines for discrimination.  In various states the GOP was less likely to support the proposals, and would stall, or if they must pass, make them one of negotiations rather than punishment for offending employers.  In California, it was submitted to a popular referendum; those supporting FEPC were the liberal Democrats and the Communists; opposed the anti-Communist Republicans.  FEPC lost heavily.  Republican Governor Earl Warren chose not to push the issue after the people had spoken.

            In 1948 despite Republican Gov. Dewey’s strong stand on FEPC and equal rights, most of the Black vote went for Democrat Truman.  For the first time a President spoke before the NAACP as Truman made efforts to win the Black vote.  When W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, broke ranks and openly endorsed the Henry Wallace Progressive Party, he was fired by the NAACP.  Thereafter, the NAACP would basically become a Democratic Party front group.  After Truman won the election, his Attorney General had Du Bois arrested as a foreign agent.  One of Du Bois’s defense attorneys was a Black Republican from Mississippi.

            In 1948 the Henry Wallace campaign was an earlier version of the civil rights movement.  Wallace refused to speak at segregated facilities, and he had to fend off tomatoes and other objects.  His campaign manager, Paul Robeson visited Progressives in Louisiana, and the landlady wanted immediate eviction.  (Officials were lenient, and gave them till the end of the month).  Bull Connor in Birmingham arrested Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho, who was running for VP on the Wallace ticket.  Various supporters in the South of Henry Wallace will turn up later in the official version of the “civil rights movement.”  But under Truman and the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, those groups that supported Henry Wallace: the Civil Rights Congress, the National Negro Congress, the Council on African Affairs, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (the original snick) were all listed and collapsed by the mid-1950s.

            Coulter is so determined to distance the GOP from the Dixiecrats that she distorts.  In 1952 Republican Eisenhower’s campaign sponsored a half hour campaign program on national television.  It was carried throughout the nation –except in some southern states where Democratic Governor Robert Kennon and two other governors gave reason for them supporting Eisenhower.  (I saw only the southern version, but I suspect the northern ad emphasized different points.)  In 1952 the county that gave the highest percentage of its vote to the Republicans, about 95%, was Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.  This parish was dominated by Judge Leander Perez, a Dixiecrat.  When singer Ted Lewis played the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blue Room in New Orleans, Perez was in the audience.  As Lewis sang his “Me and My Shadow” with his Black side-kick, Perez purposely broke glasses where they were soft-shoeing, so the Black cut his foot.  The Judge had a certain reputation.  Much later, in spring 1969 Perez died and two young Blacks in that parish went to a store to purchase liquor.  They informed the owner they were going to celebrate the death of the Judge.  They were arrested and sentenced to 6-month’s hard labor.  Because Louisiana kept a States’ Rights Party on the ballot, I doubt if he supported Nixon in 1960 or 1968.

            Coulter seems embarrassed by Goldwater, who clearly did succeed in winning the Dixiecrat vote and their electoral votes when he ran for president in 1964.  Goldwater was one of the few Republicans who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Yet, before the election in the fall, the Democrats in Louisiana purchased a full-page in local newspapers urging readers to vote for Lyndon Johnson.  It warned that Goldwater had supported FEPC in Arizona, and civil rights there also.  Consider too, that Lyndon was a fellow Southerner who understood “our” way of life.  Though totally opposed to Goldwater in 1964, I did attend his massive rally at Tulane Stadium that fall.  The crowd was excited – they wanted to hear him condemn the recently passed Civil Rights Act.  They were utterly disappointed.  Goldwater spoke about government contracts with TFX planes and other more distant issues.  The crowd wanted to explosively cheer him, but Goldwater gave them no chance.  He avoided the race issue.  Goldwater did carry Louisiana and the other Dixiecrat states, but he did not embrace the Dixiecrat cause.

            Then, there is the question of Nixon.  Coulter writes: “There was never a period…when race discrimination was a Republican policy, except maybe briefly when Nixon imposed affirmative-action on the building trades doing business with the government in the 1960s, but they deserved it.  (A policy for which LBJ is showered with praise for thinking about – but never actually implementing.)” (173)

            What LBJ thought about implementing was halted because it was the end of Lyndon’s term in 1968 and Democrat Humphrey had lost the election to Republican Nixon.  Everyone assumed that the “Philadelphia Plan” of quotas for construction unions was dead because of the election.  The unexpected occurred when Nixon and his Sec. of Labor George Schultz revived and then implemented the Philadelphia Plan.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had made quotas and hiring for racial balance illegal.  Nixon and Schultz ignored this and demanded quotas by not calling them such; they were goals and timetables.  When the issue came before Congress, it appeared as if Nixon would lose on the issue.  He sent emissaries to the NAACP requesting its help.  While many Democrats and some Republicans opposed, Nixon’s quota program squeaked past on a narrow vote.

            Nixon then issued executive orders making quota-based affirmative action government policy in all federal agencies – not just Philadelphia building trades.  The notion of quota-justice had been rejected by most Americans.  It was clearly contrary to the spirit and text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  It was contrary to the dream bespoke by Martin Luther King at the 1963 March on Washington – when his children would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.  Yet, quotas first became national policy under Republican Richard Nixon.

            Of course, Nixon could not transform America alone.  The EEOC had been working toward quotas for several years.  Many courts opposed this un-American, racist concept.  But when the issue finally reached the US Supreme Court under the new Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, the Civil Rights Act was turned on its head.  Its clear language banning quotas and hiring for racial balance became requirement for racial balance and quotas by other names.  As late as 2003 when affirmative action again reached the US Supreme Court in major cases, it was Republican Reagan appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the decision for the majority of the court upholding the use of race in effect to achieve quota-based affirmative action.

            And even before Burger, we had the Warren Court!  Earl Warren, California official most responsible for the round-up of Japanese during WWII (Republicans are always for civil rights??), Earl Warren, the man who would be VP when Gov. Dewey won the Presidency in 1948, Gov. Warren would have a career change with Dewey’s defeat.   President Eisenhower appointed him Chief Justice in 1953 and the Warren Court proceeded to follow many ideas on crime that Coulter decries.  The alleged criminal would soon have more rights with the Warren Court’s rulings.  And later Warren gave his presence to the Warren Report on the murder of President Kennedy.  I have written elsewhere criticizing various aspects of that report.  (Indeed, the first book in which I was mentioned was vol. 26 of the findings, but the index was so poorly done, I had no idea of that until the mid-70s.  Mark Lane may have been a Left-winger, but he provided access to information covered up by the government.)

            Coulter rightly condemns the Kerner Report of 1969 on the riots of the late 1960s in America.  It “decided that instead of punishing black rioters, we should hear them out and lavish black neighborhoods with…government programs.”(256)  She notes that part of the Kerner Report was written by New York City Mayor John Lindsay.  Lindsay would not switch to the Democratic Party until 1971, so he was still nominally a Republican when he wrote those views.  Lindsay was a liberal, and elected for his second term as mayor, not on the Republican ticket, but only on the Liberal line.  Still, he was a Republican and a liberal.

            In many ways Nixon was also a Republican and a liberal.  EPA, OSHA, and other liberal legislation came under Nixon’s watch.  Most importantly for this paper, Nixon’s racial quota policy was expanded to Hispanics, women, this group and that, and the quota commissars entered the personnel offices of every government agency and then every private corporation.  No longer were people hired and promoted according to merit, it was by quota, for goals and time tables, or now, for diversity.  No longer hire the best qualified, but the “basically” qualified, or even the unqualified to fill the quota and avoid heavy government imposed fines if the government finds lack of racial balance in the workplace.  Individual merit no longer counts; count only by race and gender.

            Under Republican President Reagan some urged him to rescind with his pen the executive orders requiring affirmative action.  Reagan did not do so.  Under Reagan when employment tests were administered, knowing Blacks and Hispanics could not perform as well as whites, but determined to have racial balance, Hispanics were granted an extra 10% on the exams; Black were granted even more.  Employers were not informed about the cheating done by Reagan’s government to insure hiring of lesser qualified Blacks and Hispanics.

            Reagan never rescinded the affirmative action executive order.  Neither did Bush I, who even signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, providing the first legal justification for quotas.  Affirmative action continued under Clinton and Bush II.

            Interestingly, in the 2012 Presidential campaign President Obama often declared, “It is our policy to have all the people play by the same rules.  That is just.  That is fair.”  In reality, that is the last thing Obama wants.  Obama supports the double standards of quotas and affirmative action.  His Administration seeks to expand it, even suing school districts which suspend and expel a higher percentage of Black student than whites (though they never want to know if the Blacks are a higher percentage disrupting classes, cursing, fighting, etc.).  The Left wants justice though quotas.  Yet, in most cases, quotas are inherently unjust.

            What was interesting in the campaign is that Republican Romney never called Obama out on this issue.  What do you mean, we all play by the same rules when Blacks with lower scores than whites are admitted to university, granted scholarships, given jobs, promoted, etc.?  Affirmative action is institutionalized to prevent us from playing by the same rules.  It is cheating on behalf of pet groups.  It is legalized institutional racism against whites.  It became national policy under Republican Nixon and has continued under every Republican President since – and the Democrats too.

            With the quota mentality, one has a warped view of justice.  Why is the percentage of Blacks in jail so much higher than whites?  They should be out.  They should be given all the liberal welfare Coulter condemns.  But this is the result of Republican like Warren, Burger, Nixon, Schultz, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Romney.  Coulter’s paragraph on Nixon and the building trades distorts the role of the GOP in institutionalizing anti-white racism, which then amplifies to justify anti-white crime.

            Mugged is a good book, but Coulter’s analysis of the GOP is warped.